True complexity of polynomial progressions in finite fields

The true complexity of a polynomial progression in finite fields corresponds to the smallest-degree Gowers norm that controls the counting operator of the progression over finite fields of large characteristic. We give a conjecture that relates true complexity to algebraic relations between the terms of the progression, and we prove it for a number of progressions, including $x, x+y, x+y^{2}, x+y+y^{2}$ and $x, x+y, x+2y, x+y^{2}$ . As a corollary, we prove an asymptotic for the count of certain progressions of complexity 1 in subsets of finite fields. In the process, we obtain an equidistribution result for certain polynomial progressions, analogous to the counting lemma for systems of linear forms proved by Green and Tao.

An arithmetic transference proof of a relative Szemerédi theorem

Recently, Conlon, Fox and the author gave a new proof of a relative Szemerédi theorem, which was the main novel ingredient in the proof of the celebrated Green–Tao theorem that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Roughly speaking, a relative Szemerédi theorem says that if S is a set of integers satisfying certain conditions, and A is a subset of S with positive relative density, then A contains long arithmetic progressions, and our recent results show that S only needs to satisfy a so-called linear forms condition.This paper contains an alternative proof of the new relative Szemerédi theorem, where we directly transfer Szemerédi's theorem, instead of going through the hypergraph removal lemma. This approach provides a somewhat more direct route to establishing the result, and it gives better quantitative bounds.The proof has three main ingredients: (1) a transference principle/dense model theorem of Green–Tao and Tao–Ziegler (with simplified proofs given later by Gowers, and independently, Reingold–Trevisan–Tulsiani–Vadhan) applied with a discrepancy/cut-type norm (instead of a Gowers uniformity norm as it was applied in earlier works); (2) a counting lemma established by Conlon, Fox and the author; and (3) Szemerédi's theorem as a black box.

Enumeration of Unlabeled Directed Hypergraphs

We consider the enumeration of unlabeled directed hypergraphs by using Pólya's counting theory and Burnside's counting lemma. Instead of characterizing the cycle index of the permutation group acting on the hyperarc set $A$, we treat each cycle in the disjoint cycle decomposition of a permutation $\rho$ acting on $A$ as an equivalence class (or orbit) of $A$ under the operation of the group generated by $\rho$. Compared to the cycle index method, our approach is more effective in dealing with the enumeration of directed hypergraphs. We deduce the explicit counting formulae for the unlabeled $q$-uniform and unlabeled general directed hypergraphs. The former generalizes the well known result for 2-uniform directed hypergraphs, i.e., for the ordinary directed graphs introduced by Harary and Palmer.